Doomsday Warrior 05 - America’s Last Declaration (16 page)

Eleven

T
he Glowers danced. They heard the music, the harmonies of the stars streaming down like the choruses of the gods. They danced to the music of the heavens, of the clouds, of the writhing molten lava and gravity waves deep within the earth. They moved in concentric circles, their blue bodies crackling with pulsating electricity. Without touching they moved just inches apart, their outstretched violet fingers sending out flames of pure energy to the next of their kind in the spinning circle, cutting through the air like swords of lightning. They danced out the rhythm of existence, the movement of the energy spectrums, the meshing of rays and bands of energy beyond human comprehension, moving with the eternal flow and ebb of the universe.

With their star-blue eyes they could see the waves of gravity of the earth rising up to grab all things, the mega pulses of the quasars shot a billion light years through black space. Through their phantom flesh they could feel the roaring, sucking multidimensional forces of the black holes strewn throughout the galaxies like endless black pits—from which nothing returned. They saw the stars, each distinct, different from the next—blue, yellow, white, gold, brown, green—burning with the atomic fires that fueled existence. They touched the meteors with their minds, flashing through the purple skies above, felt the comets winging their vast migration routes through the universe, cold balls of fire, in a neverending trek through infinity.

They felt the magnetic waves of Mother Earth beneath their glowing feet, reaching up with her billion billion arms of electro-magnetism, pulling everything to her bosom. They felt the tidal ripplings of the planet, the great surges of a trillion tons of water, arching, moving forward and backward in great walls of blue. They felt the dance of all things and they moved with it. Their bodies were impossible, grotesque, mad things, that were surely put together by a god who had gone insane. All of their internal organs had been placed on the outside of their blue flesh, pulsing, heart beating like a glistening ultraviolet living creature. Internal organs writhing, sending out their currents and electric blood to one another. Their brains moving slowly like slugs, twisting this way and that within the transparent brain cavities, sending out and receiving the telepathic multi-spectrum messages of their fellow beings.

The Glowers—human beings transformed and mutated into their present terrifying appearance a century before. Descendants of astronauts trapped aboard an orbiting space station who returned to earth after the great war. But the massive amounts of radiation they had absorbed in space from the detonation of twenty thousand nuclear warheads and the fact that they had to return through the highly radioactive parts of the upper atmosphere in their space shuttle made them give birth to children, creatures the likes of which the world had never seen. And their touch could kill. Unwittingly, the first of the new species had destroyed their own parents as they reached out for love.

But now they were together, all seventy nine of their kind. Creatures linked mentally and emotionally in a single telepathic consciousness. But ironically, though they were closer than any living thing had ever been, they could not even touch one another. For that touch meant instant death to anything with a cellular structure. Of all creatures, they were the closest and farthest apart from their own species—their blessing and their curse.

They danced for hours through the long black night, creating a rainbow of throbbing color in the center of their wasteland home in the Far West of the U.S. An energy bond was built between them that seemed to rise in intensity as their bodies grew ever brighter, until the very air was snapping in thunderous explosions from the sheer power of the electric streams whipping between them.

At last they stopped and stood motionless, their hands still extended. Their bodies’ internal organs pumped violently, sending blue blood coursing through their transparent flesh. They no longer ate human food. Anything they touched burned up and evaporated in puffs of radioactive smoke. They absorbed the energy around them, shooting down from the sun, the cosmic rays, the earth’s electromagnetic charge, these were their lifeblood fueling them, filling them with megawatts of power. In the total stillness their minds met, meshing firmly together like a vast mosaic that when assembled reveals but a single total picture.

“The battle is here. The test of the Armageddon has arrived.” They spoke as one—putting forth their thoughts into the single mind. “The Rockson has returned. He has survived his ordeal in Moscow and now he is back. The warrior yet lives. But even his strength is not equal to the evil that is about to descend. He is but a man. We must act.”

“But we have never acted,” a single voice spoke out from the many. “We have always watched, observed. We have been part of the harmony. We have never entered or affected the world of the humans.”

“But now is a new time,” one of the many answered. “The moment of megadeath is upon us. There may be no more humans. No more Glowers. No more Planet Earth. This cannot be.”

“Cannot be, cannot be,” Their mental voices whizzed in the air between their rock-still electric blue fleshed physicalities, their arms outstretched, almost touching, like a circle of nightmarish Christs.

“We must affect time/space,” one of the many spoke. “We must join the humans.”

“Join, join.” There were some voices that spoke no. But the unity was more powerful—was perfect. All was as one. They joined together in a mounting chorus of mental connection, until all were linked in perfect waves of agreement, their minds and emotions in absolute harmony.

“We’ve never destroyed before, except those who came to destroy us. But now—we must stop those who would send our planet into the black ether of frozen space. We must use our power—all of it, to turn the tide of history.” They pulsed together, brighter and brighter until their bodies seemed to fuse and there was but one blue ball of fire, spinning around them so that they appeared to be one solid entity of brilliant flame. Just as suddenly the glow died out and they bowed to one another.

They headed out to their three vehicles—sand ships—with towering energy collecting metallic sails atop the sand ships headed toward the east, soaring just inches above the shifting earth. They quickly reached their cruising speed of fifty miles an hour as they sped past immense black cactuses and wasteland animals that ran off at their approach. The Glowers stood on the bows of their craft staring straight ahead at the dark horizon. The sun began setting as they rushed forward, glowing like blue jewels in the night—to try to alter the destiny of mankind.

Nearly three hundred miles south and east of the Glowers’ advancing fleet of sand ships, a team of hybrid pack horses, their backs weighted down with heavy equipment, marched stubbornly across the rocky terrain. Small bald men, thin as rails and hardly bigger than children, coaxed the ’brids on.

“Stubborness equals will power times the desire to avoid work,” Ullman the Equator said, whipping at the backside of the hybrid in front of him. Nearly thirty of the humanoid creatures, not one over three feet high, worked and yelled at the pack animals. These were the Technicians—a race of super scientists, the descendants of the original missile crew that had manned the complex of silos in the Far West where the radiation had evolved their children into their present spindly form. The Doomsday Warrior had made contact with them nearly six months before and had brought back weapons, the black-beam-particle pistols that the race had created. Weapons possessed of extraordinary power, the silent black beams could destroy trucks, tanks, even planes from miles away with awesome results. A second team had been sent out from Century City to obtain more weapons and try and persuade some of the Technicians to return with them so that Dr. Shecter, Century City’s science chief, could learn how to produce the mysterious weapons himself. Erickson, the tall Swede, and Lang, a star-patterned mutant like Rockson himself, had been chosen to lead the second expeditionary force. After much hardship and struggle they had reached the underground silo home of the scientifically ingenious mini-men and the entire race had elected to return and help the American freefighters.

“We are tired of this stasis anyway,” Ullman had told them, returning with the vote. Now, they moved slowly across the vast no-man’s-land on the way back to Century City. Erickson and Lang, tough as nails with the same blue and violet eyes as the Doomsday Warrior, helped the Techs move the hybrids along. The thirty pack animals were piled high with black beam rifles and pistols—enough to arm nearly half the fighting force of Century City. And at the rear of the force, pulled by two teams of ten hybrids each, were two immense black beam cannons, almost ten feet long, black and smooth as glass, mounted on crude wood-wheeled wagons. Weapons capable of reaching to the moon, though thus far the enemies of mankind had not managed to gain that as a military base.

Lang rushed forward to Ullman who along with Qatar the Algebraic and Stryx the Quantum were leading the head of the hybrid team, pulling at the foul creatures’ reins, coaxing them, yelling at them, doing everything they could imagine to make the beasts of burden speed up.

“How’s it going?” Lang asked Ullman, who had a black beam pistol perched precariously in the waist band of the plastisynth gray jumpsuit that he wore. The Technicians’ leader’s bald head shone like a light bulb in the shimmering heat of the noonday sun.

“It is progressively linear,” Ullman replied in the strange mathematical jargon that all the Techs spoke. “According to calculations we should reach your habitation within five or six time intervals.”

“You mean days,” Lang said, grinning as he always did when he spoke with the race of mini-scientists.

“Time periods of twenty four hour gestation, affirmative,” Ullman answered, licking his dry lips. “But this physicality needs more liquid sustenance as do all the beings.” He swept his hand over the huffing and puffing hybrids, short stocky creatures bred specifically for carrying heavy loads on their thick, wide backs.

“Yeah, they’re looking a little pooped,” Lang said, slapping one of the ’brids on the thigh, which snorted angrily and snapped its head around in a half-hearted attempt to bite him with its wide cavity-mottled molars.

“Water necessity equals weight of being times metabolism times the square root of temperature times .1222981,” Ullman said matter-of-factly. “My calculations lead to the conclusion that cessation of physicality will occur within 3.2 days, unless liquid sustenance is obtained.”

“We passed a water hole, an underground spring on the way here,” Lang said, trying to reassure the somewhat nervous Ullman. This was the first time that the race of Technicians had gone more than a few miles from their subterranean missile complex, with its machine shops and storehouses of particle beam weapons. They had believed, until Rockson had shown up, that they were the last beings left alive on earth and that the entire planet was as black and charred as the terrain around their base, which had taken nearly a direct hit from a twenty-megaton kiss, courtesy of the Soviet empire, a century earlier. Everything had been killed for miles around them, and even after a hundred years not a blade of grass had shown its green face through the hardened lavalike surface. Now they were out in the wilds of America, excited, brave and terrified.

“Water supplies will reach zero equation in precisely 17.6 hours at present rate of consumption,” Ullman said, looking up at Lang, who towered over him, with his glistening wide brown eyes. And as if the mere thought of being without the precious liquid filled him with trepidation, Ullman hefted his gourdlike canteen from his waist band and took a deep slug. Several of the ’brids eyed the fluid, licking their huge tongues out in the air.

“It’s there, I promise you,” Lang said. “I’ve got no interest in disrupting my physicality, as you say.” Ullman smiled for the first time in days at the human’s attempt at Technician talk.

“You are like the Rockson,” Ullman said, remembering the man who had taught him and his race about survival, feeding them from their own supplies, then taking Ullman and several of his people out into the wastelands where he had showed them how to survive, how to hunt and how to kill. “You are an equation of strength.”

Suddenly there was a wild commotion at the back end of the weapons train of hybrids. Ullman and Lang swung their heads around as they heard the frantic brayings of the pack animals. One of the black beam cannons, weighting nearly three fourths of a ton, had begun sliding to the side of the crude wooden wagon, made of branches thatched together with wire, that it rode on. As it tilted to the side, the front left wheel of the wagon cracked in two and the entire primitive vehicle began tipping over to the ground.

“The cannon must not make ground impact,” Ullman yelled out, “or its molecular structure will implode.” Lang tore back to the slowly sliding cannon as the team of ’brids in front of the wagon stopped in their tracks and jumped around in noisy terror. Lang saw that he would never reach it in time when he suddenly saw Erickson coming up from the back, running at full speed. The big Swede grabbed hold of the side of the wagon, trying to slow its descent. He grunted and strained with every fibre of his being as his muscles bulged and veins stood out on his face and neck. From the other side of the wagon, two Technicians threw thin nylon loops of rope around the front end of the cannon and tied them to the backs of several ’brids, keeping the cannon from toppling over.

Lang had almost reached Erickson, his hands outstretched to help his fellow freefighter hold up the great weight, when he saw Erickson crumble. Everything moved in his vision in slow motion—Erickson suddenly falling to the ground, his hands ripped and bleeding, unable to support the weight of wood and the black beam weapon. As he fell, the upper half of the broken wagon wheel followed him down like a shark pursuing its prey into the murky waters of the ocean. Erickson hit the dirt flat on his back and had no time to move as the full weight of the load came down on his chest. The jagged half-wheel ripped into his upper body and clean through him, severing the chest and backbone in half like a guillotine. Erickson jerked twice and then was still.